Why is HIV so gay in NZ?
NB: post has been updated
Every four days in this country, someone contracts HIV. More often than not it is a white homosexual male from Auckland. The NZ AIDS Foundation is at a loss to explain why, yet the foundation supports the right of someone who is HIV positive not to disclose their condition before sex, and hs often maintained that HIV is not a gay disease in this country.
Why then, is it that the of the male speakers at this week's Pan-Pacific Regional HIV/AIDS conference, nearly all of them are gay, including all those who are HIV positive, yet the overseas speakers are straight, including those who have HIV?
Given that 68 percent of new intections of HIV in this country over the past four years are from men who have sex with men, does that mean that the conference sponsor, the New Zealand AIDS Foundation, is the only national AIDS foundation in the world that is really an organisation, on the whole, run for gay men, has a high proportion of it's staff as gay men, and is an organisation founded and owned by the gay community? Why is New Zealand so unique that, of HIV sufferers, such a high proportion comes from the gay community?
Similar organisations in other countries are run by by people including church leaders while others have involvement with churches. Even in liberal countries such as Canada, most people who recieve services in a similar organisation in Canada, nearly half are heterosexual
Does anyone think that the NZ AIDS Foundation would be wiling to work with conservative church groups in this country?
3 comments:
Are we unique?
Or are we more honest with our stats?
It has been a long-standing criticism of the AIDS Foundation that they are more concerned with furthering the "gay agenda" rather than focusing on the control of AIDS. By "agenda" I mean things like the recent comments from them that they prefer the "right" to have semi-protected sex and dismissing any "right" the recipient has of disclosing to them that they have HIV. (Well maybe not totally dissmissive but minimising at the very least) This attitude is disturbing and the reasons they state for non-disclosure are paranoid and I think incorrect.
The thrust is that HIV+ people (but as you say: in reality gay men) should be able to jeopardise others with impunity - because they are acting as advocates for the "rights" of HIV+ gay men rather than acting to protect people from being infected with HIV in the first place. They have accepted that the risky, promiscuous behaviour of the class of gay men (that includes "straight" men-that-have-sex-with-men group) cannot and should not be curtailed and that any attempt to do so (eg. compulsory disclosure) will result in them going underground and not having a check-up and therefore spreading HIV. I find this line unconvincing. They would say the low rate in NZ is due to that policy however - but I'm not convinced that another strategy could not have yielded similar results. They promote it though because, I think, they value their sex-drives more than the lives of others. That sounds awful and no-one would like to be in the position of voluntarily relinquishing that freedom of lifestyle (esp. if you were certain you personally were responsible enough to act with "reasonable caution"), but if you put lepers in charge of leper policy you wouldn't have leper colonies and you would then have leperosy outbreaks would you not? The same could be said for other diseases and the risks the entire community runs if they are given zero supervision and a box of prophalactics and told to go loose.
A cynical person might conclude that to keep their organisation alive they need to have HIV+ people in the community, ie. they have a perverse incentive. What organisation that has found a dual role as advocating for a part of the community (ie. gay men) would willingly act to dissolve itself? It is not rational for such an advocacy agency to destroy itself - it's (unwritten) aims would be to ensure there is a large pool of dependent "stakeholders" to sustain it's existence.
Issues such as these occur in all sorts of organisations - I'm not singling them out as unique or inherently underhand or disingenious because I'm sure they must do a vast amount of positive things for those with the disease - but as it has developed their advocacy role needs to be looked at from outside perspectives.
Further thoughts:
It follows that if the foundation is fundamentally about preserving the lifestyle of gay men then transfering the management to another stakeholder group would achieve a different approach and ethos:
The female victims of promiscuous husbands - if they took it over I think one of the top priorities would be compulsory disclosure. I wonder how they would handle prevention?
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